Episode 488 of the Smashing Security podcast, hosted by Graham Cluley with guest Paul Ducklin, covers several recent security stories. The lead item is the arrest by the FBI of an executive at a ransomware negotiation firm, reportedly at a cybersecurity conference, in connection with the investigation into the ShinyHunters gang. The hosts…
Troy Hunt of Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) analysed the leak that ShinyHunters attributed to Carhartt. The leak was claimed to hold more than 50 GB of customer and employee records. The initial extraction showed 24,876,077 unique email addresses. Closer review showed that a large share came from the TPC-DS benchmark dataset (tpcdssf1000) store…
Federal investigators examining ShinyHunters have uncovered potential links between the extortion group and executives at two ransomware negotiation firms, according to a KrebsOnSecurity report published on October 19. An executive at an unnamed U.S. consulting firm (reportedly 1,000+ employees) allegedly helped operate the group's extort…
In August 2026, French intellectual property software and services company Questel was targeted in a ShinyHunters "pay or leak" extortion campaign. The group published a large corpus of data it claimed to have taken from the company. The data is largely corporate contact information tied to sales leads, support cases and marketing activit…
In August 2026, the digital health company Sharecare was targeted in a ShinyHunters "pay or leak" extortion campaign. The group subsequently published data it claimed was taken from Sharecare's systems, containing 318k unique email addresses. Most of the data consists of B2B sales and marketing records, including names, physical addresses…
A Semperis annual ransomware risk report, covered by The Register, finds that 37% of ransomware attacks involved psychological or physical threats against victim staff. The survey covered 1,200 post-ransomware organizations in the first half of 2026. Respondents reported psychological intimidation (23%) and physical threats (17%), aimed a…